Released FBI Memo Documents Bush Ordering Torture

For the Soldier who fights for Truth, calls his enemy his brother. -- William Blake

Jason Leopold had an amazing find when perusing old released FBI documents the ACLU posted has posted on their site. There are about 100,000 such memos at the site, and who knows how much else is buried in that cache? The memo he reports on was first posted by the ACLU in December 2004, but the information in it lay buried until just this week.

Senior FBI agents stationed in Iraq in 2004 claimed in an e-mail that President George W. Bush signed an executive order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other harsh tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

The FBI e-mail -- dated May 22, 2004 -- followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential executive order.

According to the e-mail, Bush’s executive order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, “stress positions,” sleep “management,” loud music and “sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.” to extract information from detainees in Iraq, which was considered a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Bush has never before been directly linked to authorizing specific interrogation techniques at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Bush has admitted, however, that he personally signed off on the waterboarding of three "high-value" prisoners.

Leopold notes that previously the Bush White House (in the person of Alberto Gonzales) stated in 2004, "The president has not directed the use of specific interrogation techniques." But the Senate Armed Services report on Department of Defense treatment of prisoners did note that at the very least it was President Bush himself whose February 7,2002 Executive Memorandum denying al-Qaeda and the Taliban Geneva protections, “opened the door” to torture and abuse of prisoners.

While Jason is writing a news article and can't call Bush and Gonzales liars, I can. The FBI memo is clear evidence of such an executive order. The FBI agents are writing for clarification of what constitutes reportable "abuse," since they have been ordered to report abuse to their superiors.

From the memo:

Our questions relate to the instruction in the EC to report abuse. The EC states that if "an FBI employee knows or suspects non-FBI personnel has abused or is abusing or mistreating a detainee, the FBI employee must report the incident.

This instruction begs the question of what constitutes "abuse." We assume this does not include lawful interrogation techniques authorized by Executive Order. We are aware that prior to a revision in policy last week, an Executive Order signed by President Bush authorized the following interrogation techniques among others sleep "management," use of MWDs (military working dogs), "stress positions" such as half squats, "environmental manipulation" such as the use of loud music, sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc. We assume the OGC instruction does not include the reporting of these authorized interrogation techniques, and that the use of these techniques does not constitute "abuse."

In a posting earlier today, Emptywheel noted that the FBI memo above was also quoted in the Department of Justice Inspector General Report on FBI involvement in detainee interrogations. The e-mail made a stir when first reported in December 2004, but the news dropped out of site after the White House issued a denial, and no EO surfaced.

Looking at the DoJ OIG report, I noticed that there was no denial of the claims made regarding coercive interrogation methods in a Bush presidential executive order by either OIG, or any number of officials who received this message. One would think that if the agent was incorrect, someone would have noted it. But in fact, the reference by the FBI agent to Bush's presidential EO is not denied by those who best would have known if it were true. I take this as convergent, though not definitive, evidence of the EO's existence.

Take for instance the final follow-up to the agent's request, by FBI General Counsel, Valerie E. Caproni:

Does it answer his question to say that conduct that is known to be authorized need not be reported?

In other words... go away, don't bother me! Just follow what constituted authority tells you to do.

Shame on the FBI agents who wrote this memo, and shame on the FBI higher-ups who hid behind terms like "lawful" or "authorized" for what are clearly abusive torture techniques. While noting they would still report physical beatings, sexual humiliation "or other conduct clearly constituting abuse," the effect of the Bush EO was to draw indefinable lines between torture and "harsh" abuse. Apparently these agents were unaware that even "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" treatment is outlawed by both the Geneva Convention and the Convention Against Torture, treaties to which the U.S. is signatory, and are law in the United States. Clearly, Bush was unaware or uncaring of such facts, having used his attorneys to cook up bogus legal opinions for the ongoing torture he had already ordered.

The consequences of Bush's torture program are incalculable, from the loss of international trust, to the decay of law, both at home and abroad. Of course, there is the damage to the tortured themselves. PHR wrote a great book, Broken Laws, Broken Lives, on how torture affects its victims. But here, I only want to point out how it affected just one of Bush's torture victims, Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, and who was never the Al Qaeda mastermind the administration claimed he was. He was tortured so he could cough up a (false) link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, in order to provide a cause for war for the bellicose Bush administration.

How's Zubaydah doing today? Years now let out of his CIA prison, and held still at Guantanamo, even months after Obama determined the prison should close, let this description by Joseph Margulies in the Los Angeles Times today on Zubaydah's current condition serve as an epitaph for this article, if not for this nation's soul:

Partly as a result of injuries he suffered while he was fighting the communists in Afghanistan, partly as a result of how those injuries were exacerbated by the CIA and partly as a result of his extended isolation, Abu Zubaydah's mental grasp is slipping away.

Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already, he cannot picture his mother's face or recall his father's name. Gradually, his past, like his future, eludes him.

If a monarch leader who orders torture cannot be prosecuted for this heinous crime, then what hope is there left for our society?

Song of Enion

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath -- his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun,
And in the vintage, and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn:
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season,
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs:

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter-house moan;
To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead:
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity --
Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.

From William Blake's The Four Zoas, 1796-1807?

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright"

Happy 250th birthday to the English poet and champion of human liberty, William Blake!

From his America, A Prophecy, 1793:

Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd
Around their shores, indignant burning with the fires of Orc;
And Boston's Angel cried aloud as they flew thro' the dark night.

He cried: `Why trembles honesty; and, like a murderer,
Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station?
Must the generous tremble, and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence
That mock him? Who commanded this? What God? What Angel?
To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestrain'd performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is giv'n to the strong?
What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest?
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs?
What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself
In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!'

So cried he, rending off his robe and throwing down his sceptre
In sight of Albion's Guardian; and all the Thirteen Angels
Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, and threw their golden sceptres
Down on the land of America; indignant they descended

Headlong from out their heav'nly heights, descending swift as fires
Over the land; naked and flaming are their lineaments seen
In the deep gloom; by Washington and Paine and Warren they stood;
And the flame folded, roaring fierce within the pitchy night...

Blake was a rebel, a mystic, an engraver, and an amazing poet. He was arrested in 1803 for "high treason" for uttering "Damn the King, damn all his subjects..." Luckily, he was acquitted.

Blake's critique of the Industrial Revolution's brutal materialism, and his search for a poetic and religious freedom that would break the chains of human bondage mark him as one of the most important writers giving birth to the modern age. He protested slavery, and believed in racial and sexual equality: "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)".

Generations of poets and writers have found great inspriation in the massive, if often obscure, poetry of his "Prophetic Books." His Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were lyrical portraits of childlike innocence and terror, and a protest against a world that would swallow up human souls in the "demonic mills" of rising capitalism.

Oh, that we could use the spirit of Blake to walk among us today!

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)